Oakland's Yoshi’s Pulls Jazz CD With No Blacks

AP) ^ | Jun 2, 2007 12:54 pm US/Pacific

[BenLurkin]

OAKLAND Managers of Yoshi's, one of the Bay Area's best-known jazz venues, said they will pull the club's first-ever CD off the market after community leaders complained the recording featured no black musicians.

Club managers apologized Friday for what they called "a huge mistake" and "a major oversight." They said they plan to create a new recording that better reflects the musicians who play the 340-seat venue at Oakland's Jack London Square.

"We really messed up on the CD," said Yoshi's owner Kaz Kajimura. "We apologize to anyone who feels slighted by this omission, as that was never our intention."

The new CD will include black musicians, who make up more than half the performers who play at Yoshi's, Kajimura said.

Yoshi's had sold about half of the 1,000 copies of "Live at Yoshi's: Anniversary Compilation," which the club began offering on its Web site last month. The disc was not distributed to stores.

[LiteKeeper]

So what?!

[BenLurkin]

Amazing isn’t it?

I’m still hoping for the day when we are judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin.

[sit-rep]

C’mon! You know the routine... Next will be the blonde singer on the cover surrounded by black men. Then everyone will be happy...

[Gay State Conservative]

So 40 years ago I should have been demanding that Motown withdraw 99% of its albums rather than choosing whether or not to buy them....which I did because most of them were outstanding.

[sourcery]

They charge an arm-and-a-leg for their sushi—which is good but not great. Not worth the price.

[kjo]

Bean-counting Madness.

[toddlintown]

How about Lithuanians?

[GodBlessRonaldReagan]

One of my closest friends is a very talented jazz and blues bassist. He’s Caucasian, and he has told me many horror stories about “Crow Jim” encounters in the jazz community. He finally retired from music entirely, which is a crying shame.

[AZLiberty]

I wonder if they’ll go back and pull all the jazz CDs with no white musicians.

[Sir Clean Plate Club]

12%. That's it. No more. Shut up.

[LiteKeeper]

My thought exactly. Again, why does it matter? Are we talking equal opportunity CD’s now? Weird!

[navyguy]

Yoshi’s should be shut down for having no Inuit employees.

[canuck_conservative]

Didn’t the US Olympic Basketball Team a few years back have no white guys?

[Sender]

Even the Beatles got to release one white album.

[jwh_Denver]

LOL! I guess even the blacks didn’t want to see Yoko naked either so they let it slide.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"So what?!"

Reviews criticized the disks' lack of rhythm...

[weegee]

Jazz isn’t black entertainment anymore. Just tune into BET and see how much Jazz music is presented vs. Hip Hop, Rap, R&B, etc.

Music doesn’t know skin color but racists do.

[Uncle Hal]

What if the CD had all black entertainers and no whites? Do you think a complaint by the media would get it shut down? I do not think so.

[visualops]

The new CD will include black musicians, who make up more than half the performers who play at Yoshi's, Kajimura said.

If they are more than half the performers there, then why weren't some of them on the CD? It sounds like the CD was hardly representative of the performers, no matter what color. What was the criteria to getting on the CD?

[ronnie raygun]

NO BLACK MUSICIANS? Hell there’s no Islamic musicians this is worse!

[popdonnelly]

Oakland sucks.

[JimRed]

Jazz ain’t jazz widout it be black???

[Salvey]

It sounds like the CD was hardly representative of the performers, no matter what color.

Do you know jazz? Do you listen to it? The dirty little secret is that the greatest jazz players around today are white. No value judgment being made here; just the plain facts. In earlier times, it was the other way around.

[visualops]

I’ve been lucky enough to see some great jazz performances,, but that wasn’t my comment or my question.
If the CD is supposed to be a compilation of performers at that club, then what was the criteria for inclusion? It just seems statistically unlikely that if the performers are about 50/50 black/white, that there wouldn’t be one black performer on the CD. And I don’t care if the black/white ratio was their hair color.

[BenLurkin]

What was the criteria to getting on the CD?

I'm thinkin' maybe it would be whatever would sell the most CDs.

[visualops]

Considering they sold them via the website, and not retail, it would seem they were selling them to people who attended/wanted to attend the performances.
But who knows? Maybe the CD only had 10-15 tracks from thousands of performances. Let’s say they picked the 10 highest-grossing acts or some such criteria, then they should have simply said, we picked the most popular acts and they happened to be all whites. In that case, in redoing the CD they caved to the race-card and deserve to be scorned.

[thegreatmalcolmx]

Or the recent quote from Shaquille Oneal, that Steve Nash’s MVP award was tainted because he was white.